SEVERAL YEARS AGO I began asking my friends and family to tell me their passwords. I had come to believe that these tiny personalized codes get a bum rap. Yes, I understand why passwords are universally despised: the strains they put on our memory, the endless demand to update them, their sheer number. I hate them, too. But there is more to passwords than their annoyance. In our authorship of them, in the fact that we construct them so that we (and only we) will remember them, they take on secret lives. Many of our passwords are suffused with pathos, mischief, sometimes even poetry. Often they have rich back stories. A motivational mantra, a swipe at the boss, a hidden shrine to a lost love, an inside joke with ourselves, a defining emotional scar — these keepsake passwords, as I came to call them, are like tchotchkes of our inner lives. They derive from anything: Scripture, horoscopes, nicknames, lyrics, book passages. Like a tattoo on a private part of the body, they tend to be intimate, compact and expressive.

I now use 1Password to create unique passwords for each service, but the article did take me back to the one password story I do have. Back in college, when it was time to select a password I could remember easily, I remember leaning back in my chair and giving it some serious thought.

I had just seen Patch Adams and top of mind for me was part of a poem the character recited that really stuck with me (full version here):

I know it’s ridiculously syrupy, but I apparently used to be a romantic. Huh.

Anyway, my default password became two words from the poem, smashed together. Even though I don’t use the password any more I just can’t get myself to tell you which words, though. I guess some of this story needs to remain mine alone.